


Sacrifice

by glitterburn (orphan_account)



Category: Watchmen
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 13:00:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30337
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/glitterburn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is how it all began, past and future revealed and concealed, and a character formed in the bowl of a bronze tripod.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sacrifice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meiou_set](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=meiou_set).



> For meiou_set as part of the Fall Fandom Free For All with the request 'Adrian as a teen'. I've mixed comic book and movie canon, borrowing Matthew Goode's interpretation of Adrian as the son of a Nazi. This is another excuse for me to ramble on about Hellenic oracles, this time Delphi. Alexander offered sacrifice at Delphi as a young man, continuing a tradition set by his father Philip. The story about Alexander mistreating the Pythia is very likely Roman slander, though Clavel takes it as fact. The reference to Croesus and the oracles is from Herodotus I.46ff; the quote on circumstance is from VII.49.

His father is obscenely rich. Adrian never asks where the money comes from, though he knows it has something to do with Brazil and the old boys' network. Their wealth sometimes makes his mother wring her hands and dab at her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief. Whenever she's upset, her accent slips. Her imperfect English takes on the tones of the Rhineland. Adrian's father gets angry with her on those occasions. He beckons her out of the sitting room, leaving Adrian perched on the edge of the pale green velvet-upholstered sofa with its perfect white antimacassars.

Adrian doesn't listen to their arguments. He watches television instead, the flickering black and white of images from around the world a shadow-play for his senses. Television is so much more real than his family.

At school he is too clever. The teachers are suspicious and his peers are afraid. Adrian doesn't want to be different. He studies his father and learns how to conceal the truth, brushing on a patina of lies and a gloss of normality. He trains himself to become average. It fools the teachers but not his fellow students. They know he is far from the norm and they treat him accordingly, with a mixture of flattery one day and cruelty the next.

Adrian knows their behaviour is contradictory only because they fear his difference. He wonders if they can smell it on him. Terror has a scent, and desire, but does intelligence? Sometimes, he sniffs the crook of his elbow or beneath his arm, or he bends forward in gym class and sniffs between his knees. He smells only the scent of soap and clean, healthy perspiration.

By the time he's thirteen, he discovers the origins of his family's riches. His father was a Nazi. Not a soldier following orders, but an informer who sold the secrets of his friends and neighbours and in return grew rich and fat from the sale of their goods and properties. The truth confuses and sickens him. His father is evil and a coward, yet he is also a respected businessman. Adrian watches him for days, wondering how it is possible for a man to have two faces. One of those faces must be a mask, but Adrian doesn't know which is real and which is false.

On his fourteenth birthday, Adrian confronts his father with the truth. His father refuses to speak of it. His mother tells him he'll understand some day when he grows up. Adrian doesn't want to wait. He wants to understand now.

That year, a girl transfers into his class. She's small, dark, Jewish. Adrian, tall, blond, Aryan, finds an excuse to sit beside her. He's transfixed by their physical differences. They date briefly, but it ends the first time he kisses her. He tastes guilt and death, and pulls away in horror. It's not her, it's him. She sobs at his words, curling in on herself, shuddering with misery.

Adrian decides then and there that he will find some way to alleviate the burden of guilt. It's not just his guilt, but that of the whole world. War is the cause of unhappiness. The division of nations and cultures is an unspeakable crime. The world would be a better place if only it could come together and unite under a benevolent leader for the common good.

He turns to history and reads about Alexander the Great.

At seventeen, Adrian is an orphan. He already knows what it feels like to be alone. Now he wants to know how it feels to have nothing. He takes his tainted inheritance and gives it all away.

* * *

He'd booked the cheapest berth on a P&amp;O ship crossing the Mediterranean, anticipating a dawn arrival into the Golden Horn for the first part of his pilgrimage. Instead, Adrian succumbs to curiosity and leaves the cruiser at Piraeus. As he wanders around the wide boulevards and narrow twisted streets of Athens, absorbing its janiform nature, a plan unfurls. He has no fixed schedule, so he lets the plan develop.

He's long intended to visit the oracle of Zeus-Ammon at Siwa, the place where Alexander's godhead was confirmed, but there are oracles within Greece that also demand respect. Adrian seeks out a bookstore and buys a battered copy of Herodotus. He remembers the reference easily, his mind sharpened with anticipation, and he sits in the shadow of a grave stele in the Kerameikos to read.

A short distance away, on the other side of the stream, a couple of archaeologists make slow work of uncovering a large stone jar. They ignore him, speaking together in German. Adrian pretends not to understand their conversation. He's not German, no matter where he was conceived. He's American. He slides the ancient Greek text down into his lap, hoping the archaeologists don't recognise it.

He flicks to the passage where the Lydian king Croesus sends to the most famous oracles in the Hellenic world, asking them what he's doing on a certain date. Messengers journey to oak-wreathed Dodona, the dreaming shrine of Amphiaros in backwater Oropos, the manmade kiln-cave of Trophonios in Lebadeia, the borderland sanctuary of Abae in Phocis, famous Didyma at Miletus, and the barren heat of Siwa. Only Delphi answers Croesus correctly and in detail, and so it is to Delphi that Adrian will go first.

The bus journey is long and uncomfortable, the engine barking and choking as it approaches the slightest incline. The Greeks stare and talk about him as if he's not there. It would be amusing to answer them in their own language, but this would make him even more different, so Adrian remains silent. He reaches into his rucksack and takes out Herodotus. The Father of History, they call him, but also the Father of Lies.

Adrian reads of the Persians as the bus drags itself ever closer to Delphi. He reads of Cambyses and Darius and Xerxes, of great victories and great hubris by rulers of unbridled power and arrogance. Persia will eventually fall to Alexander, and Adrian's thoughts wander away from the narrative history. He stares out of the window at the mountains, the scrubby pines, and the dust. Through the open window he breathes in the scent of thyme and exhaust fumes.

The bus stops on a bend near a modern roadside shrine. A man climbs aboard, scattering a few phrases of idiosyncratic Greek to the driver and several of the passengers. The man wears a linen suit with a scarf draped around his neck. Unmistakably he is French. He sits beside Adrian uninvited and studies him with a faint smile. He looks like an elegant dissolute. Adrian turns away.

"Men do not rule circumstance, rather they are ruled by it," the Frenchman misquotes lightly, speaking in Parisian-accented English. When Adrian looks at him, he nods toward the copy of Herodotus. "The guiding principle of Herodotus, yes?"

"I always thought his interest was in great achievements and how the clash of personality brought civilisations into conflict," Adrian replies.

The Frenchman chuckles. "Ah, you are young, and the young are always fascinated by war."

"The old, too." Adrian estimates the Frenchman's age at between forty-seven and fifty-three. He looks comfortable and jovial, but bitterness lurks in the creases around his eyes and mouth.

"_Touché_." Rather than taking the hint and leaving him alone, the Frenchman holds out his hand. "Monsieur Henri Clavel of the French School. And you are?"

"Adrian Veidt."

"A student? How charming. From Harvard, perhaps?"

Adrian almost tells him that he dropped out of high school to embark on this journey of self-discovery, this pilgrimage to Alexander, but he's sure Clavel won't understand. Instead he says, "I wanted to visit Delphi."

"How fortunate! I am the assistant supervisor to the chief archaeologist at Delphi." Clavel's smile is bright, but beneath it Adrian detects jealousy. From this he surmises that Clavel's superior is younger than him, and much resented.

They talk of the latest discoveries at the site, and Adrian begins to feel pity for the man. Clavel is intelligent but not gifted. He has gone as far as he can go in his field, yet still he wants more. He doesn't see that his ambition is greater than his capacity for growth. Men should always know their limits. Alexander did, if only for the sake of his troops. Adrian knows he hasn't even begun to test his own limits yet.

"Permit me to show you my work," Clavel says as they step down from the bus. He takes Adrian's arm, cupping his elbow, and leads him up the Sacred Way toward the sanctuary.

"Where are your colleagues?" Adrian asks, his gaze fixed on the jagged backdrop of the mountains, black-veined and grey-shrouded, covered in rivulets of pine. The sky is very blue, the sun a blaze of white. A hawk hangs suspended on the up-draughts, and silence rings around the sacred space.

"It is the day off," Clavel says. "No one else will come here today. You may enjoy your visit in peace."

Adrian looks at the half-curve of the theatre high above them, then focuses on the various treasuries as they draw nearer. Siphnian, Boeotian, Theban, Athenian, each the repository of untold wealth, the gratitude of kings and oligarchs and democrats, the safe space within sanctuary.

Clavel grips his arm tighter as their feet slide over the worn polish of broken marble. Adrian knows why the Frenchman is holding him. He can feel the surreptitious stroke of fingers against his side, the delicate almost-caresses. Perhaps he is a fool to come here alone, a mere seventeen-year old youth with a much older man, the _eromenos_ to Clavel's _erastes_. But Adrian is certain that if it came to the test, he would be able to overpower his suitor.

"Alexander came here," Clavel says, as if discussion of Alexander will bring Adrian more readily into an embrace. "Philip enjoyed a special relationship with Delphi. He wanted his son to continue the same way. But Alexander was young and headstrong, and did not understand the value of patience, just like so many young people today."

He changes his grip, squeezing Adrian's bicep and making a small grunt of appreciation at the firmness of the muscle. "When Alexander arrived, it was an unfavourable day. The priests turned him from the temple doors. You know what he did next, yes?"

Adrian is aware of this story. "Alexander broke down the doors and demanded the Pythia cast a prophecy for him."

"Yes! A shocking thing. Terrible." Clavel shakes his head, insinuating himself closer to Adrian as they reach the top of the Sacred Way and approach the Temple of Apollo.

It's ruinous, a jumble of masonry and shattered pillars, cracked by time and earthquakes, the stone softened by the elements. A neat square is marked out in string, a sheet of tarpaulin covering the ground beneath. Adrian pulls free of Clavel's grasp and goes toward it, wanting to lift the tarpaulin to see what treasures lie hidden. He doesn't want to ask Clavel's permission, so he turns and strides through the temple, imagining the great bronze doors opening for him, imagining the light streaming in to illuminate the _omphalos_ and the sacred laurel tree, the bronze tripod and the draped form of the Pythia.

Clavel laughs and calls after him, "So like Alexander, rushing into the unknown."

Adrian faces him. "Alexander challenged the unknown."

"By seizing the Pythia's sacred person and dragging her to the tripod atop the chasm." Clavel frowns, gesturing toward the _adyton_ at the back of the temple, from whence the oracle was delivered. "Laying hands upon the Pythia in violence... Most unseemly."

Adrian walks backwards, sensing the buckle and slump of the floor without tripping. "The end justifies the means, surely? The Pythia declared him invincible. A god amongst men. A claim later verified by the oracle at Siwa."

Clavel waves a hand in dismissal, his nose wrinkling as he follows Adrian through the collapsed temple. "Siwa is nothing, an oracle for farmers and simpletons. Delphi is the only oracle that matters. Apollo spoke the truth from this very site. History bears witness to the fact."

"But history, like oracular pronouncements, can be twisted," Adrian argues. He comes to rest in a depression of stone, a slab lower than the masonry surrounding it. A crack three inches wide runs through it. When he bends to look more closely, he catches a scent, almost indefinable. He breathes in deeply and recognises sweetness, like the slow rot of fruit, the turn of apples softening to cider, the death of peonies and roses.

Knowledge trembles through him. He jerks upright, breathing clean air rather than the sacred gas reserved for the Pythia. His head spins, and as if from a far distance he watches Clavel draw nearer.

The Frenchman is smiling, talking his nonsense, a gleam of seduction in his eyes. He comes closer, his hand outstretched. Adrian can't hear what he's saying. Instead, his mind is full of voices speaking in tongues. They babble to a climax, words becoming screams – not of pleasure, but of agony. Adrian knows he must save these voices, the voices of the whole world. He is responsible for their preservation at any cost, but he doesn't know how he will do it.

A fog falls over his sight. He feels Clavel touch him. The screams grow louder. Agitated, longing for silence, Adrian pushes against the darkness that overwhelms him. The screams fade, drifting into the triumphant shriek of a hawk on the wing. The fog dissipates in the glare of the sun. Silence falls, save for the pounding of blood in his ears.

Adrian looks down and sees Clavel dead at his feet, his body stretched across the depression in the rock. There's blood, a spatter of bright scarlet that pools and runs into the crack in the stone, a libation to the chthonic gods, an offering to Apollo.

He stands there for long moments, wondering how Clavel died. He wonders if he killed him, or if the man simply fell and hit his head. He wonders if it matters.

Adrian thinks again of Herodotus. Circumstance rules men, this much has just been proven, but he has no intention of letting circumstance rule him. Because he is not just any man. He is like Alexander. He has plans for the world, plans half-formed and embryonic, ideals rather than ideas. They will come to fruition one day, he knows this; and when they do, he will remember this first sacrifice, and he will give thanks to the gods.


End file.
